A childish desire
by George Jonas
National Post
October 1, 2008
Latitudes parallel attitudes. Future prime ministers and presidents will outnumber sales managers when you ask 10-year-olds north or south of the line what they will be when they grow up. The same sample will contain few prime ministers or presidents 30 to 40 years later, but if sales managers were trout, you could stock a fair-sized lake with them.
One reason is that leading a nation is a childish desire. Most people grow out of it.
I won't yield to the temptation of saying that adults who strive or connive for high office are childish. I will only suggest that leadership candidates are likely to be in touch with their inner child.
The conceit that you -- whoever you may be -- have got what it takes to run a country also requires a child's innocence. (Not even newspaper columnists believe they could run a country. We often sound as if we did, but that's just for show.)
Running for top office is a declaration that one has mastered the intricate, multi-faceted knowledge the job of national leadership requires. The person claiming this must believe he or she has the wisdom and judgment to tackle dilemmas of energy, environment, economy, justice, gender, culture, labour, liberty, war and peace. Such delusions are rare even in clinical settings. Fancying a mastery of all these subjects requires such a profound ignorance of what they entail as to be unavailable to most people after the age of 10.
Holding such beliefs honestly requires, if not infantilism, at least a self-confidence nature has engineered out of most healthy adults. The cumulative judgment that allows us to tell apart missions possible and impossible -- called "experience" -- restricts most of us to wanting to run countries only up to the age of 10. By the time we're old enough to actually run things, we settle for car dealerships or newsrooms.
Here's Jonas's First Law of electoral politics. What disqualifies a person for the national leader's job is that he or she wants it. Q.: Name the plainest demonstration of unsuitability for U.S. presidency. A.: Candidacy. It fits Barack Obama, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Joe Biden equally.
I tell a friend. What a silly generalization, he answers. Is this supposed to be true of every politician?
No. Nothing is true of everybody. There may be caring bank robbers and hospitable hangmen. But why is Stephen Harper the right man for the job that precludes him from putting his ideas into practice? Doesn't StéphaneDion's sincere belief that his leadership would benefit Canada disqualify him automatically?
Readers might say: Oh, this is tongue-in-cheek, to which I reply: Don't be so sure. More precisely, whether or not I mean it, perhaps you ought to consider it. The suggestion that leaders should ideally be draftees rather than volunteers hasn't only been made by tongue-in-cheek drive-by-shooters like me, but by the iconic Friederich von Hayek.
The Nobel-Prize winning economist was of the view that politicians were suspect precisely because they were seeking public office -- in other words, power -- and perhaps it would be better to draft our leaders from lists drawn up by professional associations, law societies, chambers of commerce, and so on. After all, we draft jurors; we don't advertise for applicants. When Hayek first advanced the idea in his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, he seemed to feel that behind every campaign to "serve" society was a despot looking for an opportunity to rule it. (He didn't put it this way, but I do.)
We wouldn't be comfortable with eager beavers hanging around the courthouse looking for jury duty, flashing signs at passers-by that say: "Let me be the judge." We should feel the same way about politicians knocking on our doors at election time. It's a mystery why we don't.
On re-reading this, I'm having second thoughts about saying it's childish for politicians to think they can run a country. After all, that's what we tell them. When we think a job requires real qualifications, we stop electing and start selecting. When we need a thoracic surgeon at the municipal hospitals, we don't vote on applicants; we call on a medical board to appoint one.
But when it comes to government, we're democrats. We don't appoint leaders; we'd rather have leaders disappoint us.
My friend is sticking to his guns. Stop mixing apples and oranges, he advises. Thoracic surgeons go into diaphragms, not legislative chambers. They're hands-on; they're little Dutch boys. To put your finger into the dyke, you must know where the leak is.
A leader needs to know nothing about leaks, except who in town fixes them. The person with the best set of yellow pages is the best leader. IQ? Learning? Sophistication? Please! England never had a better ruler than Queen Victoria. The question you ask yourself is who, in today's terms, is closest to Queen Victoria, then put an "X" next to her/his name on the ballot.
My friend is American. He won't tell me whom he's voting for, but my guess is Sarah -- I mean, the Republican ticket. What's your guess?